Labor Left wrong again

One of the myths of progressive politics in Australia is the possibility of a regional solution to people smuggling.

Systemic corruption in Indonesia and other Asian countries makes it impossible to break what Immigration Minister Chris Bowen calls “the people smugglers’ business model” – the chain of financial transactions by which asylum seekers sail here on fishing boats.

When port officials, policemen and members of the military accept bribes from people smugglers, as they do frequently in the nations to our north, regional co-operation becomes a mirage.

While Bowen attends regional conferences, each of them establishing vague “framework agreements” and lengthy agendas for their next meeting, corrupt Asian officials keep the business model alive – in some cases running the business themselves.

It is a measure of Indonesia’s ambivalence on the issue that, 10 years after Tampa, it has only recently made people smuggling a criminal offence, enacting legislation in April. No one who knows the country well is expecting a large number of convictions.

The origin of Labor’s regional strategy lies in its post-Tampa trauma.

Following its defeat at the 2001 election, the ALP caucus elected Simon Crean as its leader, unopposed. He was, and remains, process-driven, a former ACTU president who loves to organise meetings and conduct negotiations.

With his party divided on whether it should support the offshore processing of asylum seekers, Crean promoted the concept of regional co-operation. This helped settle Labor’s internal policy war.

It was, however, a political compromise of the worst kind: sweepingly noble in its public presentation yet thoroughly useless in implementation.

Small wonder then that Crean’s opposition immigration spokeswoman from 2001, Julia Gillard, resurrected the idea when she became Prime Minister. It bought her time on a difficult issue leading into the 2010 election, offering the illusion that Labor had finally found a way of stopping the boats.

At every turn, the Crean-Gillard strategy has failed. People smuggling rackets continue to flourish in Indonesia, reaching into senior levels of the nation’s administration.

Labor’s promise of a regional processing centre in East Timor remains unfulfilled.

Now its so-called Malaysian solution, having been struck down in the High Court, lacks the parliamentary numbers to be resurrected via amendments to the Migration Act.

This is a further blow to Gillard’s legitimacy, the first clear sign that her minority government is unable to secure legislative passage of its program.

The lesson for Labor is clear. In its long history, policy compromises with the party’s Socialist Left faction have always been disastrous.

The Left has a warped, abstract understanding of equity. Often its policy prescriptions result in real-life tragedies. Public housing estates, Aboriginal affairs and disadvantaged schooling are examples.

Asylum seeker policy is perhaps its greatest calamity.

Even though it is synonymous with the sinking of unseaworthy boats and the drowning of hundreds, the Left continues to advocate onshore processing.

The wrongness of this position is evident in the statements of its official spokesperson, senator Doug Cameron. On ABC Radio’s The World Today program earlier this month he said: “It’s not the [asylum seekers’] problem that the only way they can get here is through the people smugglers.”

Normally, when families are killed, as many were on the cliffs of Christmas Island last December and in scores of other boat-people drownings, it is regarded as a problem.

Not for Cameron, however.

He sees no problem in asylum seekers bypassing United Nations processing centres and paying people smugglers large amounts of money to sail to Australia.

Apparently he is untroubled by the use of ramshackle vessels for this task.

Cameron and his colleagues must be incredibly, indeed barbarically, stubborn not to abandon the left-wing shibboleth of onshore processing.

After a decade of policy failure, Gillard needs to reject this nonsense and embrace the proven success of the Howard government strategy: offshore processing at Nauru and Manus Island and the reintroduction of temporary protection visas. As ever in public policy, what matters is what works.

Mark Latham is a former federal Labor leader.

The Australian Financial Review

BY Mark Latham

Former ALP leader Mark Latham pulls no punches as he
scrutinises the Australian political landscape and the Labor Party's
fortunes.